Saturday, February 13, 2010

Except for a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth's surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded. The graph shows global annual surface temperatures relative to 1951-1980 mean temperatures. As shown by the red line, long-term trends are more apparent when temperatures are averaged over a five year period. Credit: NASA/GISS.

Eroding confidence in climate science punctuated by a pair of blizzards has global warming skeptics across the United States calling for a sharp rollback to years of political and industrial efforts to curb greenhouse emissions thought to contribute to global warming.

Climate scientists are on the defensive, and they're not backing down.

Public views have shifted starkly over the past year on the long-running controversy over whether global warming is real, and whether human activity contributes to it.

In a survey released last month, the percentage of Americans who think global warming is happening declined 14 percentage points vs. the year prior, to 57 percent. The survey, from the Yale Project on Climate Change, found that only half of U.S. residents say they are "somewhat" or "very worried" about global warming, a 13-point decrease from 2008.

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